Kwanjung Yee

A large amount of heat flux from aerodynamic heating acts on reusable spacecraft; thus, an accurate heat flux prediction around spacecraft reentry is essential for developing a high-performance reusable spacecraft. Although the approximate convective-heating equations can calculate the heat flux with high efficiency and sufficient fidelity, the heat flux should be evaluated over a thousand times for the entire trajectory in multidisciplinary analyses. For these reasons, it is necessary to develop an efficient method for calculating the heat flux for multidisciplinary analysis. In this paper, an efficient method for heat flux calculation that is adoptable by multidisciplinary analyses for hypersonic vehicles, such as spacecraft, is developed. Approximate convective-heating equations were adopted to relieve the computational cost of estimating the heat flux, and an adaptive time step method for heat flux calculations was developed to reduce the number of heat flux calculations required across the entire flight trajectory. A dynamic factor was introduced that adjusts the time step between each instance of the heat flux calculation. Since the time step using this factor could increase under low heat flux conditions, the number of heat flux calculations decreases by approximately one-tenth with over 90% accuracy. Therefore, the efficiency was improved with high accuracy using the adaptively-determined time step according to this dynamic factor.

A multirotor electric vertical takeoff and landing (EVTOL) aircraft is specialized for intracity point-to-point urban air mobility services due to its advantages of efficient hover performance, high gust resistance, and relatively low noise. Because of its multiple rotors, rotor–rotor interference inevitably affects flight performance, mainly depending on inter-rotor distance and rotor rotation directions. It is assumed that there exists an optimal rotation direction for a given lot of multiple rotors. In this study, the aim is to investigate rotor–rotor interference for various rotation directions and the resulting flight performance. We propose a concept of rotor rotation direction that achieves the desirable flight performance in forward flight. The concept is called front-retreating/rear-advancing (FRRA), in which the retreating side of the front rotor and the advancing side of the rear rotor are aligned in a straight line. To this end, a multidisciplinary flight simulation framework was developed to predict the flight performance of a general multirotor EVTOL aircraft. It was found that the FRRA concept minimizes thrust loss due to rotor–rotor interference in high-speed forward flight. For a generic mission profile, the rotation direction set by the FRRA concept reduces the battery energy consumption by 7% in comparison to the rotation direction of unfavorable rotor–rotor interference in operation.